The Future of Trust with Mat Yarger

In this episode, we sit down with Kazuna Yamamoto, a founder, venture builder and activist based in Berlin. Born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore and Japan, and shaped by years in Chile, Kazuna learned early that trust is something you build from scratch when you arrive somewhere with no safety net.

The conversation moves from a viral petition she launched at 21 against a Japanese tabloid, which made her a national target, to her one-way ticket to Santiago and a fintech startup frozen by COVID. Kazuna and Mat dig into how growing up in multicultural environments changes who you trust by default, why dance taught her that vulnerability is a form of trust, and the moment a friend’s actions cost her credibility with people who had vouched for her. As Mat puts it, trust is a one-to-many relationship. Kazuna also walks through Voice Up Japan, the organization she runs, and its Femicide Project, including an AI-built femicide tracker and an agent that matches domestic violence victims with pro bono lawyers. She closes by naming the human skill she thinks matters most as AI takes on more: empathy. In her words, “I just hate the world a lot, but I love the world a lot.”

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Kazuna Yamamoto

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kazunayamamoto/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kazunayamamoto/?hl=en

Kazuna’s organizations and projects

Voice Up Japan: https://www.linkedin.com/company/voice-up-japan/

The Femicide Project and Japan Femicide Tracker: https://japanfemicidetracker.com/

Make Japan Vegan: https://makejapanvegan.com/Japan

Emergency Peace Action: https://japan-peace-action.org/

Tech for Palestine Berlin: https://techforpalestine.org/

Referenced in the conversation

International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo, where Kazuna studied: https://www.icu.ac.jp/en/

In this episode, we sit down with Peter Keutgens, an actuary and data scientist who spent more than two decades at WTW in the UK, where he went from quant researcher to leading the firm's quantitative team. Peter grew up in Turnhout, a provincial Belgian town close to the Dutch border. He was the quiet kid in the corner building with Lego. A maths teacher who doubted him early on taught him something he still uses: a title gives someone weight to voice an opinion, but it is still only an opinion.

The conversation starts with the manager who pulled Peter out of "The Quant Corner" and taught him to communicate. It moves on to the second career he built after redundancy, which combines actuarial data science, blockchain and his love of flying gyrocopters. Peter explains why what really makes an aircraft fly is "money and paper," and how handwritten maintenance records erode trust when an aircraft changes hands. He also explains why his Aviation Trust Network should be a nonprofit standard. Mat and Peter dig into digital twins and data ownership, including how to keep a pilot's personal flight data apart from an aircraft's permanent record.

They then unpack Peter's modelling of costs under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and of the supply of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). One finding stands out: if carbon captured from the air earns full ETS credit, that CO2 will sell for at least the price of an allowance. That makes synthetic jet fuel more expensive than many people expect.

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Peter KeutgensWebsite: https://peterkeutgens.com/Contact: https://peterkeutgens.com/contact/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterkeutgens/
Peter's work and projectsWriting and working papers: https://peterkeutgens.com/writing/Tools, including the SAF inputs calculator: https://peterkeutgens.com/tools/Infrastructure, including the Aviation Trust Network: https://peterkeutgens.com/infrastructure/
Referenced in the conversationWTW, where Peter spent his career in investment consulting: https://www.wtwco.com/European Actuarial Academy, where Peter completed the Actuarial Data Science programme: https://www.actuarial-academy.com/Howest University of Applied Sciences, which reviewed Peter's Aviation Trust Network white papers: https://www.howest.be/VLAIO, the Flemish innovation agency: https://www.vlaio.be/EU Emissions Trading System (ETS): https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/carbon-markets/about-eu-ets_enENTSO-E Transparency Platform, Peter's source for European electricity generation data: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/NGFS climate scenarios, used in Peter's SAF feedstock modelling: https://www.ngfs.net/Project Speedbird, the British Airways, LanzaJet and Nova Pangaea SAF partnership: https://www.lanzajet.com/speedbird

In this episode, we sit down with Oneza Zaim, a carbon markets analyst at Planet2050, a climate fintech company financing high-integrity CO2 removal projects and opening carbon assets up to retail investors for the first time. Born in Abu Dhabi and raised across three very different environments, Abu Dhabi, Pakistan, and now Berlin, Oneza traces her understanding of trust back to a childhood spent learning other people's languages just to make herself understood.

The conversation moves from her training as an industrial auditor, through a site visit where she walked into an unmarked chemical vapor leak and had to call a halt on the spot, to her current work vetting carbon dioxide removal projects at Planet2050, where her team has screened more than 250 projects across different CDR technologies. Oneza and Mat dig into what actually makes a climate project bankable: not a checklist, but a matrix of who is carrying which risk, how dependent a project is on subsidies that could disappear, and whether the story on paper matches what you find on the ground. As Oneza puts it, "integrity does not mean that you do not have weaknesses, it means you know where they are and what you're doing about them." They also unpack why projects tied to an existing supply chain, like coffee waste turned into biochar, tend to earn investor trust faster than nature-based projects like mangroves, even when the latter matter just as much.

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Oneza ZaimLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oneza-zaim-6767a159/

Planet2050Website: https://planet2050.earth/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planet-2050

Referenced in the conversation
Lucas Zaehringer, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet2050, who Mat references as a longtime collaborator going back to his time at Gold Standard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-zaehringer-65725145/
Gold Standard, the carbon certification body where Mat previously worked with the Planet2050 team: https://www.goldstandard.org/
Open Forest Protocol, the blockchain-based forest monitoring platform Oneza cites as an example of improved traceability for nature-based projects: https://www.openforestprotocol.org/

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Forson, President of DeFi Technologies and a serial entrepreneur working across asset management, cryptocurrency, and blockchain infrastructure. Raised in a small blue-collar town outside Montreal by two Ghanaian immigrant physicians, Andrew traces his approach to trust in institutions, markets, and government back to a childhood built on self-reliance and hard work.

The conversation moves from wrapping digital assets into regulated investment products, to QuickPick's blockchain-powered remittance platform for underbanked users, to the moment a trusted co-founder tried to sell stolen IP behind his back. Andrew and Mat dig into what he calls the real break in global trust: sovereign debt. With nearly all of the world's 195 countries carrying unsustainable debt loads and politicians facing zero accountability for it, Andrew argues "you are certainly a shareholder in the country's outstanding debt" — whether you realize it or not. They also unpack why small, disciplined economies like Switzerland, Singapore, and Rwanda earn outsized trust, and what it would take to give the world's poorest access to fair, inflation-proof investment.

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Andrew Forson
Website: https://www.forson.com/
X: https://x.com/Forson
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paforson
Andrew’s companies and projects
DeFi Technologies (Nasdaq: DEFT): https://defi.tech
Valour: https://www.valour.com/en/about
Kwikpik: https://kwikpik.io
Stillman Digital (DeFi Technologies subsidiary): https://www.stillmandigital.com/
QXT Capital: https://www.qxtcapital.com/
Scramble Academy, Torremolinos, Spain: https://scramblestuff.com/scramble-academy-worldwide/
Referenced in the conversation
The Hashgraph Group, where Andrew previously led ventures and
investments: https://www.hashgraph-group.com/
M-Pesa, the Kenyan mobile money platform Andrew cites as the first
credit-based e-money at scale: https://www.safaricom.co.ke/main-mpesa/about-m-pesa/m-pesa-journey
Dell Technologies Solar Community Hubs, the shipping-container
connectivity project Mat describes outside Manicore,
Brazil: https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/corporate/newsroom/announcements/detailpage.press-releases~usa~2022~05~02052022-dell-technologies-unveils-solar-community-hubs.htm
FAS Amazonia, the Brazilian foundation running the Amazon
hubs: https://fas-amazonia.org/solar-community-hub-da-dell-expande-conectividade-e-conservacao-na-amazonia/

From investigating forged documents on Estonia's post-Soviet border to founding ComplyOnce, Raido Saar has spent his career chasing the same question: how do you know who's really on the other side? Along the way, he helped shape Estonia's X-Road digital government infrastructure and built one of the first biometric passport identity solutions in Europe.

In this episode, Raido sits down with Mat Yarger to unpack why the world spends $500 billion a year on anti-money-laundering efforts yet recovers just 0.02% of illicit funds, how outdated identity checks let one scammer open five fraudulent accounts using the same stolen face, and how Raido himself nearly got scammed on a fake podcast call. He also shares how LinkedIn and its verification vendor lost his identity data twice, and makes the case for a single encrypted identity key that could replace the passwords, selfies, and stolen accounts fueling today's fraud epidemic. It's a candid, wide-ranging conversation about why our systems for verifying trust are still built on 1990s architecture, and what it will actually take to fix them.

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In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Mahony, Chief Architect at RYTchain, where he's building a Layer-1 blockchain designed to bring governments and citizens onto a shared, gas-free infrastructure. Jeff grew up poor in Southern California and was working manual labor jobs by age nine, an experience that shaped his belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not.

That belief carried him from aerospace and defense, where he worked on high-stakes systems, into financial infrastructure, where he built SaveDaily, a no-minimum, no-fee investing platform for what he calls "the other 93 percent" of America. We talk about fatherhood at twenty-nine and the ego it forced him to confront, why he'd rather build for relevance than race to be first, and where he thinks the AI industry is heading without enough seasoning behind its talent. It's a conversation about opportunity, durability, and what it actually takes to build systems people can rely on.

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In this episode, we sit down with Deanna Reitman, Partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, where she works at the intersection of energy, commodities, and compliance. Her career has been built on a simple premise: trust has to survive scrutiny, not just sound good in a pitch deck.

Deanna shares how an early grounding in rules and consequences shaped a career spent in the rooms where deals unwind, ownership gets disputed, and standards collide with the law that actually applies. As more markets lean on real-time data and digital platforms, she's blunt about where people get it wrong: "Data doesn't prove ownership. Leases do." We explore what it actually takes to protect a buyer from acquiring something they don't own, why self-reported compliance keeps creating the same failures, and what she needs to see before she'll stand behind any system, digital or otherwise. The conversation closes on what it would take for carbon markets and digital assets to hold up under real pressure, instead of unraveling the moment scrutiny arrives.

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Episode 24 | The Trust Architect: Why Everything You've Built to Look Credible Is Working Against You

Gal Borenstein has spent 30 years inside some of the most complex organizations in America, defense contractors, cybersecurity firms, government technology companies. And what he keeps finding is that trust rarely breaks down because of the technology. It breaks down because the CEO believes one thing about their company and the people actually doing the work believe something completely different.

In this episode, Gal walks us through what he learned arriving in the U.S. at 21 with no network, no family, and no credentials that transferred, and how that shaped his entire philosophy on earning credibility from scratch. He breaks down why the old model of building trust, logos on a page, case studies, polished messaging, has stopped working in an environment where anonymous reviews override carefully constructed reputations and AI amplifies broken processes at scale.

We get into the Guardian framework from his book "Don't Believe the Hype," covering transparency, collaboration, and the trust index he runs inside organizations. That index reveals something most leaders don't want to see: customers rating a core company value at a 3 while leadership assumes they're at an 8. Gal also shares why he walks away from clients who refuse to let him interview their customers, and what that tells him about the real state of trust inside those organizations.

If you're building something and trying to earn genuine credibility, this one cuts straight to what actually matters.

Connect with Gal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/galborensteinexecutiveprofile/ | http://www.BorensteinGroup.comBooks: "Don't Believe the Hype", "Beating Goliath with AI", "ACTIVATE!", and "What Really Counts for CEOs "are available on Amazon.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:40 From Israel to America: Starting Over at 21

00:08:43 Learning American Culture from Nick at Nite

00:11:00 Building the Borenstein Group from a $28K Job

00:24:00 What Israel Taught Gal About Surviving Under Pressure

00:30:57 Why CEOs Are Hard to Help (And How to Do It Anyway)

00:35:36 Trust Is No Longer Transactional

00:37:17 How AI Amplifies Broken Processes

00:40:35 The Guardian Framework: Transparency, Collaboration, Trust Index

00:46:24 Every Stepping Stone Has to Be Earned

00:48:52 Trust = Consistency + Persistence + Outcomes

00:50:04 The Fictional Boardroom: Why the C-Suite and Staff See Different Companies

00:55:14 Radical Transparency, Proof Over Promises, Human Accountability

00:57:00 What Investors Are Really Evaluating When They Assess a Brand

01:00:31 How Long Does It Take to Rebuild Trust?

01:01:02 The Diagnostic: Voice of Customer vs. Internal Perception

01:05:02 How to Reach Gal and Final Thoughts

What happens when someone who spent years studying broken institutions decides to help build the next generation of them?

Tiffany Wang trained as a corporate lawyer, moved into risk assurance and fraud investigation at PwC, and then made the jump to FLock.io — a federated AI company building the infrastructure for private, decentralized model training. Her whole career has been defined by one question: why do institutions say one thing on paper and operate completely differently underneath?

In this episode, we get into her path from law firm to Big Four to AI startup, what federated learning actually means and why it matters for governments and sensitive sectors, and how FLock is working with UNDP to build climate resilience tools and micro-insurance platforms for unbanked communities in the Dominican Republic and Peru. We also dig into the Mauritius healthcare project, the work happening with the state of Sarawak in Malaysia on sovereign AI, and what trust actually looks like when you build it into the architecture instead of just promising it.

Tiffany is also candid about what she learned about trust the hard way — from writing legal contracts designed to exploit ambiguity, to realizing words alone are never enough. Trust needs to be tested in difficult times, not comfortable ones.

This one covers a lot of ground. If you work in government, healthcare, climate resilience, or you're just trying to understand where AI governance is actually heading — worth your time.

Connect with Tiffany Wang:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-wang-91a3ab13a

FLock.io: https://flock.ioX

Twitter: @flock_io

Subscribe & follow The Future of Trust:Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6zQ2p7k8q7OAuxqJElQjjh?si=35045c6c6b264f55

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-trust-with-mat-yarger/id1792163372

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@DemiaOfficial

00:00 Introduction

02:00 Meet Tiffany Wang — Lawyer, Risk Investigator, AI Builder

03:00 Why she became a lawyer (and why debates shaped her more than law school)

05:30 What was missing in corporate law — the gap between paper and impact

07:10 The PwC pivot — getting closer to business, finding the same problem

10:20 Joining FLock — why it took three weeks and a regret calculus to say yes

12:40 What startup culture actually looks like vs. Big Four

15:40 Trail running, sacrifice, and how Tiffany thinks about hard things

18:15 Growing up between a risk-averse mom and an open-minded dad

23:00 Dating across cultures and how Tiffany learned to negotiate disagreement

31:25 The recurring question: when was your trust broken or strengthened?

33:00 What legal work taught her about the weaponization of language

35:30 Why she no longer gives 100% trust based on words alone

39:30 The gradual pivot — why there was no single turning point

44:50 What does FLock actually do? Explaining it from the ground up

47:00 Federated learning vs. traditional machine learning — the key difference

51:20 Who FLock is actually for (and who it isn't)

55:00 Working with UNDP — micro-insurance for unbanked women in Latin America

01:01:30 Puerto Rico, climate disasters, and why speed of response matters

01:04:00 Where does trust actually live in a decentralized system?

01:05:00 The verification layer — on-chain, auditable, no black box

01:07:30 Open source, community accountability, and why no one person holds the keys

01:10:00 FLock's healthcare project with the Mauritius government

01:12:00 The 10-year vision — AI tools people can use without fear

01:13:30 Sovereign AI and the work in Sarawak, Malaysia

01:16:00 Why education has to come before adoption

01:18:30 Closing — being known well vs. being well-known

01:21:00 How to connect with Tiffany and follow FLock

What happens when the data looks right, but you still can't trust it?

Matt Ober didn't walk through a polished front door into finance. He answered phones at Bloomberg, landed a hedge fund role through Craigslist, and built one of the world's most aggressive alternative data programs at WorldQuant, a quantitative hedge fund inside Millennium Partners that was testing thousands of new datasets a month and spending over $100 million to stay ahead of the signal.

In this episode of The Future of Trust, host Mat Yarger sits down with Matt Ober, Managing Partner at Social Leverage and former data strategist at Third Point, for a candid conversation about what it really means to trust information, trust founders, and trust yourself when the stakes are high, and the answers aren't clean.

Matt shares how he built trust frameworks not from theory, but from experience, watching convincing data collapse out-of-sample, witnessing activist investment battles at Third Point (Campbell Soup, Sony, Nestle), and being the investor founders call when things are going wrong.

This is a must-listen for founders, investors, data professionals, and anyone navigating decisions where the signal is loud and certainty is low.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• How growing up as the oldest of five shaped Matt's instinct for responsibility and trust

• Why answering phones at Bloomberg was the best preparation for working inside a hedge fund

• How Matt found his WorldQuant role on Craigslist, and what that says about unconventional paths

• The difference between data that looks convincing and data you can actually trade on

• What "trust but verify" really means when you're testing thousands of datasets a month

• Why activist investing is really about conviction, not confrontation

• The single most repeated trust problem Matt sees in early-stage founders

• How AI is changing the revenue-per-headcount benchmark, and what 3x-10x actually looks like

• What Social Leverage looks for when deciding to stay close to a founder long-term

CONNECT WITH MATT OBER:

• Social Leverage: http://www.socialleverage.com

• Newsletter: https//www.mattober.co

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obermattj/

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